The Golovlyov Family

The Golovlyov Family PDF Author: Shchedrin
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9780940322578
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Searingly hot in the summer, bitterly cold in the winter, the ancestral estate of the Golovlyov family is the end of the road. There Anna Petrovna rules with an iron hand over her servants and family-until she loses power to the relentless scheming of her hypocritical son Judas. One of the great books of Russian literature, The Golovlyov Family is a vivid picture of a condemned and isolated outpost of civilization that, for contemporary readers, will recall the otherwordly reality of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The Golovlyov Family

The Golovlyov Family PDF Author: Shchedrin
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9780940322578
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Searingly hot in the summer, bitterly cold in the winter, the ancestral estate of the Golovlyov family is the end of the road. There Anna Petrovna rules with an iron hand over her servants and family-until she loses power to the relentless scheming of her hypocritical son Judas. One of the great books of Russian literature, The Golovlyov Family is a vivid picture of a condemned and isolated outpost of civilization that, for contemporary readers, will recall the otherwordly reality of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Golovlyovs

Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Golovlyovs PDF Author: Irwin Paul Foote
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810113114
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
A critical look at the Russian gentry from the 1830s to the 1870s, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin's novel The Golovlyovs exposes the insubstantiality of the family as one of the proclaimed bases of Russian social life. In sharp contrast to his contemporaries, including Aksakov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Goncharov, Saltykov-Shchedrin shows the gentry family, as represented by the Golovlyovs, as disintegrating, corrupted by its status and way of life. The book, the sixth in the AATSEEL Critical Companions to Russian Literature series, begins with a brief sketch of Saltykov-Shchedrin's life and literary career, then goes on to explain the novel's content and characters, including reference to contemporary events relevant to the narrative and discussion of the major points of the novel and its conclusion. An extensive bibliography includes a listing and brief assessment of the various English translations of the novel.

Life Is Elsewhere

Life Is Elsewhere PDF Author: Anne Lounsbery
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501747940
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
In Life Is Elsewhere, Anne Lounsbery shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called "the provinces"—a place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. Lounsbery looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has exercised such enduring power, and what role it plays in the larger symbolic geography that structures Russian literature's representation of the nation's space. Using a comparative approach, she brings to light fundamental questions that have long gone unasked: how to understand, for instance, the weakness of literary regionalism in a country as large as Russia? Why the insistence, from Herzen through Chekhov and beyond, that all Russian towns look the same? In a literary tradition that constantly compared itself to a western European standard, Lounsbery argues, the problem of provinciality always implied difficult questions about the symbolic geography of the nation as a whole. This constant awareness of a far-off European model helps explain why the provinces, in all their supposed drabness and predictability, are a topic of such fascination for Russian writers—why these anonymous places are in effect so important and meaningful, notwithstanding the culture's nearly unremitting emphasis on their nullity and meaninglessness.

City Folk and Country Folk

City Folk and Country Folk PDF Author: Sofia Khvoshchinskaya
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544502
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
“This scathingly funny comedy of manners” by the rediscovered female Russian novelist “will deeply satisfy fans of 19th-century Russian literature” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). City Folk and Country Folk is a seemingly gentle yet devastating satire of the aristocratic and pseudo-intellectual elites of 1860s Russia. Translated into English for the first time, the novel weaves a tale of manipulation, infatuation, and female assertiveness that takes place one year after the liberation of the empire's serfs. Upending Russian literary clichés of female passivity and rural gentry benightedness, Sofia Khvoshchinskaya centers her story on a common-sense, hardworking noblewoman and her self-assured daughter living on their small rural estate. Throwing off the imposed sense of duty toward their "betters", these two women ultimately triumph over the urbanites' financial, amorous, and matrimonial machinations. Sofia Khvoshchinskaya and her writer sisters closely mirror Britain's Brontës, yet Khvoshchinskaya's work contains more of Jane Austen's wit and social repartee, as well as an intellectual engagement reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell's condition-of-England novels. Written by a woman under a male pseudonym, this exploration of gender dynamics in post-emancipation Russian offers a new and vital point of comparison with the better-known classics of nineteenth-century world literature.

Russian Grotesque Realism

Russian Grotesque Realism PDF Author: Ani Kokobobo
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814254684
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Offers a rereading of the Russian realist novel and proposes a hybrid genre, grotesque realism, to describe changes during the post-Reform era.

The Pompadours

The Pompadours PDF Author: Михаил Евграфович Салтыков
Publisher: Ann Arbor : Ardis Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description


Unknown Masterpieces

Unknown Masterpieces PDF Author: Edwin Frank
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590170779
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
In this original collection, several of today's finest writers introduce little-known treasures of literature that they count among their favorite books. Here Toni Morrison celebrates a great Guinean storyteller whose novel of mystical adventure and surprising revelation transforms our image of Africa, while Susan Sontag raises the curtain on a distant summer when three of the greatest poets of the twentieth century exchanged love letters like no others. Here too John Updike analyzes the rare art of an English comic genius, Jonathan Lethem considers a hard-boiled and heartbreaking story of prison life, and Michael Cunningham uncovers the secrets of what may well be the finest short novel in modern American literature. Other contributors include such noted authors as Arthur C. Danto, Lydia Davis, Elizabeth Hardwick, Francine Prose, Lucy Sante, Colm Tóibín, Eliot Weinberger, and James Wood. Lucid, polished, provocative, inspiring, these essays are models of critical appreciation, offering personal, impassioned, thoughtful responses to a wide range of wonderful books. Unknown Masterpieces is a treat for all lovers of great writing and a useful and stimulating guidebook for readers eager to venture off literature's beaten tracks. Eliot Weinberger on Hindoo Holiday by J.R. Ackerley Arthur C. Danto on The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac John Updike on Seven Men by Max Beerbohm Jonathan Lethem on On the Yard by Malcolm Braly Toni Morrison on The Radiance of the King by Camara Laye Colm Tóibín on The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley Francine Prose on A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes Susan Sontag on Letters: Summer 1926 by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke Lucy Sante on Classic Crimes by William Roughead James Wood on The Golovlyov Family by Shchedrin Elizabeth Hardwick on The Unpossessed by Tess Slesinger Lydia Davis on The Life of Henry Brulard by Stendhal Michael Cunningham on The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott

Earthly Signs

Earthly Signs PDF Author: Marina Tsvetaeva
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681371634
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
A moving collection of autobiographical essays from a Russian poet and refugee of the Bolshevik Revolution. Marina Tsvetaeva ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets. Her suicide at the age of forty-eight was the tragic culmination of a life buffeted by political upheaval. The essays collected in this volume are based on diaries she kept during the turbulent years of the Revolution and Civil War. In them she records conversations of women in the markets, soldiers and peasants on the train traveling from the Crimea to Moscow in October 1917, fighting in the streets of Moscow, a frantic scramble with co-workers to dig frozen potatoes out of a cellar, and poetry readings organized by a newly minted Soviet bohemia. Alone in Moscow with two small children, no income, and a missing husband, Tsvetaeva struggled to feed her daughters (one of whom died of malnutrition in an orphanage), find employment in the Soviet bureaucracy, and keep writing poetry. Her keen and ruthless eye observes with compassion and humor—bringing the social, economic, and cultural chaos of the period to life. These autobiographical writings not only give a vivid eyewitness account of Russian history but provide vital insights into the workings of Tsvetaeva’s unique poetics. Includes black and white photographs.

Metaphysical Exile

Metaphysical Exile PDF Author: Robert Pippin
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0197565948
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
Robert Pippin presents here the first detailed interpretation of J.M. Coetzee's "Jesus" trilogy as a whole. Pippin treats the three fictions as a philosophical fable. Everyone in the mythical land explored by Coetzee is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place. While discussing the social and psychological dimensions of the fable, Pippin also treats the literary aspects of the fictions as philosophical explorations of theimplications of a deeper kind of homelessness--a version that characterizes late modern life itself--and he treats the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge.

Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector, & Selected Stories

Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector, & Selected Stories PDF Author: Nikolay Gogol
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014191002X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Author, dramatist and satirist, Nikolay Gogol (1809-1852) deeply influenced later Russian literature with his powerful depictions of a society dominated by petty beaurocracy and base corruption. This volume includes both his most admired short fiction and his most famous drama. A biting and frequently hilarious political satire, The Government Inspector has been popular since its first performance and was regarded by Nabokov as the greatest Russian play every written. The stories gathered here, meanwhile, range from comic to tragic and describe the isolated lives of low-ranking clerks, lunatics and swindlers. They include Diary of a Madman, an amusing but disturbing exploration of insanity; Nevsky Prospect, a depiction of an artist besotted with a prostitute; and The Overcoat, a moving consideration of poverty that powerfully influenced Dostoevsky and later Russian literature.